Where were the shootings in Bridgeport? We mapped 231 of them

BRIDGEPORT — By the time the homicide rate doubled in September, violence in the Park City showed a clear trend: a spike in gun violence and an increased rate of gang-related deaths.

Data obtained by Hearst Connecticut Media detail the trend, and map each injurious shooting across the city, including fatal and non-fatal shootings.

An online map of the data, accessible at ctpost.com or http://bit.ly/2DroZo2, gives the public the opportunity to see the same detailed information that police officers do to understand shootings across the city.

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Where were the shootings in Bridgeport? We mapped 231 of them

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—Select the box to the left of the map header to add data from 2015 and 2016. The default view shows data from 2017.

“If you can’t measure it and track it, you can’t understand it and you can’t fight it,” said Capt. Roderick Porter, who oversees Bridgeport’s Detective Bureau.

Mapping shootings and tracking their relationship with gangs is a crucial tactic in the city’s larger strategy to combat gun violence, an effort complimented by the state-funded Project Longevity program.

When homicides reached a record low of 10 in the 2016 calendar year, police and community groups credited Project Longevity for much of the drop. An academic study of the program in New Haven demonstrated that it had been effective there in recent years.

Shootings went slightly up in 2017, and were way more deadly.

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While non-fatal shootings increased by only seven citywide from January to October — up to 73 from 66 during the same period in 2016 — fatal shootings during that period nearly tripled, from six to 16.

Four of the fatal shootings in 2017 took place within blocks of each other on the East End. Three of them are suspected to involve gunmen affiliated with violent groups, according to police records. A fourth led to the arrest of an alleged Norwalk drug dealer, who shot an innocent bystander, police said.

The data tracks the location of every injurious shooting in the city, broken down by fatal and non-fatal shootings, as well as whether police believe that they were “Group Member Involved,” or GMI, meaning they involved gangs and even more groups with few formal ties or organization.

Police began collecting the data in 2012 or 2013, and improved collection methods significantly in 2015, according to officials familiar with the process. Bridgeport police and state anti-gang officials review the data along with members of The National Network for Safe Communities, New York-based academic think tank.

NNSC President David Kennedy has been credited for leading successful anti-gang initiatives in dozens of U.S. cities, starting with the “Boston Miracle” in the 1980s drop to zero over just a few years.

One part of the message is telling felons not to pick up a gun. Another part is to promise to protect them from rival gangs who haven’t given up violence yet.

“We tend to think of them as offenders, but their rate of victimization is incredibly high,” Kennedy told Hearst in an interview last year. “Violence prevention means making them safer.”

Collecting gang violence data is part of a larger strategy that employs carrot’s sticks and carrots against members of violent criminal groups, along with what Kennedy refers to as the moral voice of the community—pastors, NGO leaders and families of gun violence victims.

Project Longevity

At a “call-in” in May, Project Longevity organizers delivered a series of lectures to some two-dozen parolees with ties to local gangs. It started with a stern warning: if your group shoots anybody, a prosecutor said, he’d look at the cases pending against anyone in the group, and and take them federal—meaning longer prison terms in facilities further away from family.

“We’re tired of watching you go away, we’re tired of watching you get shot and end up in a wheelchair,” Harold Dimbo, a retired police detective, told the men. Dimbo is Bridgeport’s Project Longevity coordinator.

Speakers also also offered hope, including testimonials from convicted criminals (one was recently charged with fraud), and opportunities for job training and social services to help them get on their feet.

But on July 1, at the peak of normal summer violence, Project Longevity’s budget was frozen along with the state budget. Employees worked without pay, and some eventually quit. Resources to support felon re-entry dried up, and organizers scrambled to keep their pledges of support for the felons at the call-in.

With their budget restored, Project Longevity is trying to get back on track.

“We have enhanced our partnership with the Bridgeport Police department and the mayor's office,” said statewide coordinator Brent Peterkin, in October. “We are looking to increase our custom notifications in DOC facilities as well,”—individual check-ins credited with preventing violence in the New Haven study.

Deciphering the map

Hearst Connecticut Media mapped the shootings to let readers by neighborhood using the most available data, which runs to Oct. 14, 2017 and was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request.

To make the data comparable across years, data from 2016 and 2015 were limited to that date in the calendar year. Because most shootings occur in summer months, relatively few shootings were omitted.

That means that it doesn’t include the most recent murder of Jawuan Green, 21, shot dead on January 16, 2017.

He was killed on Newfield Avenue, a few feet away from where his friend Eric Diaz, then 19, was killed on September 16, 2016. Diaz’s death is marked on the map.

Some shootings may not have been reported, even if they caused injury. Police-involved shootings, such as the death of Jayson Negron, are not included in the data.

Most points on the map approximate the place where the shooting, usually a nearby street address. Between 1 and 3 percent of the non-fatal shooting data are incomplete or contained errors — the most common were addresses listed as intersections but with only one street listed. When the street was less than six blocks long, the center of the path was chosen.

In other words, all shootings at intersections are accurate to three blocks.

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